US patent office ultimately approved 92% of applications in 2013, up from 68% in 2009
Getting patents is preposterously easy under Obama — When Apple first tried to patent the “slide to unlock” feature of its forthcoming iPhone in 2005, the US Patent and Trademark Office …
Context & Ripple Effects
The approval-rate surge is not new news so much as a confirmed trajectory: back in August 2010, Techdirt flagged that the Patent Office was back to approving pretty much anything after its post-2007 tightening, and Vox now puts numbers on it — 92% of applications granted in 2013 versus 68% in 2009. The slide-to-unlock saga is the emblematic case: Apple first filed on the gesture in 2005, and the feature went on to anchor years of infringement claims.
The stakes show up in the courtroom ledger. Apple and Samsung have just concluded their third patent trial in three years, having spent hundreds of millions on litigation with little substance to show for it — a war fought largely over software and design patents of exactly the kind the loosening office keeps granting.
First-order effects
- Software and interface filings face minimal rejection risk at the USPTO right now, so companies like Apple can keep converting routine UI work into granted monopolies at near-certain odds.
- Litigants get a bigger arsenal: every easy grant adds another asserted claim to suits like the Apple-Samsung series already three trials deep.
Second-order effects
- Rivals respond defensively, filing their own incremental patents to block or counterassert rather than to commercialize, which raises filing volumes and legal spend across the mobile industry.
- As weak patents flood the pool, courts and standards bodies absorb the cost — validity disputes shift downstream from the examiner's desk to district-court litigation.
Third-order effects
- A 92% grant rate invites judicial pushback: if examiners will not filter questionable claims, appellate courts and eventual Supreme Court review become the de facto quality gate for software patents, with outcomes far harder for filers to predict.
- Sustained over-granting builds the political case for patent reform legislation, since the visible symptom — trivial features patented and litigated for nine figures — is exactly what reform advocates cite.
The trend: Under the Obama administration the USPTO has swung back toward rubber-stamping applications, pushing the real filtering burden for software patents onto courts and setting up a collision between examiner leniency and appellate skepticism.